Category: Uncategorized

Let me unpack your question there, Uri.

When did μπ stop being pronounced [mp] and started being pronounced [mb], with voice assimilation? Early. It does not occur in Southern Italian Greek (them saying [panta] instead of [panda] for “forever” really sticks out), but it does everywhere else in Greek, and it’s a change that could have happened before /b/ without a preceding nasal went to /β/ > /v (which was in place by 1st century AD). I don’t doubt that we’re talking 1st millennium AD for /mp/ > [mb].

When did μπ start being used to transliterate /b/ in foreign languages, just as ντ started being used to transliterate /d/? Late. The giveaway is initial μπ, which violates Ancient Greek phonotactics. I wrote on the various transliterations of Bagdad in Byzantine sources, at Nastratios in Pagdatia. They uniformly use either Beta (anachronistically), or Pi for the initial /b/. Looking at the Lexikon der Byzantinischen Gräzität, initial μπ for loanwords with /b/ seem to become routine only from the 13th century on, though there look to be sporadic earlier instances.

The use of the term Anglo–Celtic in Australia has to do with the history of ethnic relations and the formation of the dominant identity in that country.

For a very long time, the Irish and their descendants, identified through Catholicism, were a separate and somewhat disadvantaged identity in Australia. They had trouble accessing the highest levels of power. They had separate schooling in the Catholic system. Sectarian conflict in the school yard, the workplace, and beyond was a real thing as late as the 1950s. And, with Aboriginal Australians decimated and marginalised, and the imposition of the White Australia policy, Catholic anglohone Australians were the most visible minority in Australia.

But the extent to which they were a minority should not be overstated. In most ways, Catholic and Protestant Anglophone Australians shared a common culture, and much of the time a common identity.

With the post war influx of Southern Europeans into Australia, people started to identify and discuss the dominant majority culture in the 70s. It was the culture that southern European Australians did not immediately fit into, and it needed a name. With British deprecated as an identity by then for descendants of the First Fleet, the first term people jumped on was Anglo.

But the memory of sectarian conflict among Anglophones was very recent. Catholic Anglophone Australians could grudgingly accept that they were part of a majority culture; but they would not accept being subsumed within a Protestant default, which is what Anglo (English) implies. They themselves had been the subalterns not that long ago. So out of sensitivity to this divide, the hybrid term Anglo–Celtic was coined.

The experience through the rest of the Anglosphere was different.

• England has had a Catholic minority for a couple of centuries, but it identifies its majority culture as English, not Anglo-Celtic.
• Scotland, Ireland, and Wales are Anglophone, but identify as Celtic.
• The dominant culture in the US was a Melting Pot of not only English and Celts, but also Dutch and Germans and Scandinavians. And that culture first defined itself not against Southern Europeans, but against Native Americans and Blacks. So the term it adopted was White.
• The dominant originally European identity in South Africa also defined itself against Blacks. And the divide between Afrikaners and Anglophones was much more profound than that between Protestant and Catholic Anglophones. So there was no urgency to speak of Anglo-Celtic South Africans.
• I don’t know as much about Canada, but the dominant Anglophone Protestant identity there defined itself against French Canadians first, and Celtic Canadians second. So after British passed out of fashion, Anglpohone was readily adopted, and presumably did not disgruntle Celtic Canadians unduly.
• The dominant identity in New Zealand had to define itself from the beginning against the Maori, who are not decimated and put out of mind the way that Australian aboriginals were. Like in Australia, that identity initially defined itself as British. Like in the US, that identity ended up defining itself racially, as not Polynesian, using the Maori word Pakeha.

Likely yes.

See:

• Does Quora’s policy on joke answers need to be reformed or modified? Many people believe it’s inconsistently and arbitrarily enforced.
• What is Quora’s policy on humorous answers/reviews?
• Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s answer collapse policy? What types of answers aren’t allowed on Quora?

And in particular:

Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s policy on humorous answers/reviews?

Humorous answers and reviews are allowed if they make the page more helpful to someone who is sincerely interested in learning the answer to the question; otherwise they are not. Answers and Reviews that are intended as jokes are not helpful responses. In addition, humorous answers and reviews that deliberately misinterpret the intent of the question/topic will be collapsed.

Quora may allow a satirical answer if it is couched with a “but seriously, …” or a “as the following reductio ad absurdum would illustrate”. But a straight joke answer will usually be reported, typically by another user, and will be collapsed.

The policy does claim that if an answer already has more than 50 upvotes (which yours did, OP: Jack Menendez’s answer to Why Trump is considered to be the greatest president in America history?), the collapse needs to be approved by three moderators.

I really am not defending Quora reflexively on this. There are some things I don’t like about Quora’s policies, and some more that I dislike about how they are implemented.

But the premise of Quora is not open-ended writing like Medium, or provocative literature like what Swift wrote. The premise of Quora is informative responses to sincere requests for information (which can still be humorous, as long as an actual answer is in there). The question may have been bait, as John Gragson answered elsewhere, but the culture is either to ignore it, or to make the response unambiguously framed.

In truth, if you (or Jon Swift) had just appended “… but yeah, no”, there would have been less room for instacollapsing.

There is a vital role for polemic in society. And maybe Quora is “a purveyor of ignorance and half truths”, as you put it in your answer, by suppressing polemic. But Quora has decided that it is not primarily a purveyor of polemic. Hence, after all, the aggressive policing of BNBR.

Trusted Reporting (Quora feature): Trusted reporters (who are not moderators but designated power users) can insta-collapse an answer or comment: Moderation at Scale: Distributing Power to More People by Marc Bodnick on The Quora Blog. They cannot delete them though.

Moderators who are in-house Quora staff are also Quora users (all in-house staff seem to be), and they can still upvote and downvote. Their upvote or downvote may count for more than others’, just as mine likely counts for more than J Random Quora user’s: their impact depends on the user’s PeopleRank, and in-house Quora staff are likely to have high PeopleRank just by virtue of seniority, if not office.

There may or may not be moderators who are outsourced; we don’t know. If there are outsourced moderators, we do not know whether they are Quora users as well, and whether they can accordingly upvote or downvote.

But like I said, the capability for insta-collapse, which trusted reporters have (and which I’d assume moderators have) has far more potential to, as you put it, sink a proverbial ship than a mere downvote does.

I post some answers anonymously, due to their subject matter.

I will not now be able to engage about any of my anonymous content, nor find out if anyone has engaged with it.

This makes me disinclined to continue to post any of my content on that subject matter anonymously. Even if it is anonymous, I still write to be engaged with, not to hurl out a message in a bottle. And since I can’t post on that content under my own name, for reasons of sensitivity, I am considering not posting it at all.

Anonymity was being abused and used frivolously, and some action was needed. This action is excessive, even if it does have technical reasons (overscrupulousness about anonymity), and it is a disincentive for me to post anything anonymously.

Well, if I’m going to be A2A’d by Ms Tsymbarevich, I am of course going to accept!

• Lived in Launceston, Tasmania, but I got better. (I actually do say this!)
• Tasmania bio: “Was born in Tasmania, but I got better 🙂 ”—see?
• Lived in Irvine, CA, but I don’t really consider that living.
• Former Project Scientist at University of California, Irvine, but let’s not open that sad chapter again.
• Senior Business Analyst & Standards Architect at National Schools Interoperability Program, Australia, but really, more policy analyst AND infrastructure developer these days. Yes, it is an odd combination.
• Nicknames: Linguist, but I couldn’t fit my usual bio “PhD in Linguistics from Melbourne University, lectured historical linguistics” into the new Credentials system, because Quora Knows Best.
• West Wing: Married to an addict of The West Wing, but after the first 20 viewings, all the holes in the show become really visible, and I want to embed a pickaxe in Josh Lyman’s head.
• Grammaticalization: Used grammaticalisation as the framework for my PhD. (It didn’t quite fit.) But I think it’s a great framework for understanding language change, even if it is hazy on the causations and overly optimistic about the unidirectionality.
• Roman Empire: Have read about the BYZANTINE empire, co-wrote monograph on a Byzantine poem, but the Quora Ontology has decided not to differentiate between Rome and Constantinople.
• Survey Questions: I… occasionally succumb to answering survey questions, but likely not occasionally enough.
• Quora Usage Data and Analysis: My kingdom for a functioning Stats page, but I have learned to manage my expectations. And yes, it’s functioning better than it used to, but it’s still not that informative.
• Politics of Australia: Federal Australian Politics. Gladiator sports for the 2010s, but really, not much less gladiatorial in previous decades—just less corpses.
• Nick Nicholas: I am a world expert on at least one Nick Nicholas, but you’re going to have to work out which one on your own.

Lost connections by Archie D’Cruz on Bug? or Feature?

Drop everything you are doing, and upvote Joachim Pense. Vote #1 Joachim Pense’s answer to My native language is English, but it seems that more inflected languages are widly more complex. Does every language really have equally complex grammar?

There are some bad answers here, and some good answers here. There’s a progression of sophistication that needs to be invoked.

• THESIS: Knuckledragger argument: Savages speak primitive languages, because they are savages, and they don’t have the sophistication to know any better.
• Reactive linguist argument: Savages have some pretty damn sophisticated languages. And we do not believe that they are lesser human beings than us.
• ANTITHESIS: Every language must be equally complex, because all humans have equal mental capacity.
• Supporting argument: Um… sure, language A has the most complex inflectional morphology in existence, and language B has no morphology at all. But have you seen the syntactic hurdles language B has put up, to make any sense at all? Language A doesn’t even have any syntax! So it must all balance out.
• Supporting argument: it’s pretty damn hard to quantify complexity in incommensurate parameters of language, such as morphology and syntax. Phew. So we can get away with saying languages are equally complex.
• Opposing argument: A Turing machine can work out an algorithm to generate language. That complexity is not as unquantifiable as you might think.
• Opposing argument: That Antithesis is not an argument, it’s a statement of faith. Of course, the original Thesis wasn’t even that, it was just uninformed racism.
• SYNTHESIS: some languages are likely going to be less complex overall than others, particularly if there has been creolisation in their past. Afrikaans is a good example. That depends on your metric for complexity across the various aspects of language, but that metric is not impossible to arrive it.
• That said, the fact that Afrikaans or, well, English is likely less complex overall than Latin or Finnish or Lakota in no way means that Afrikaaners or English people are mentally deficient compared to Finns or the Teton Sioux.

Most Viewed Writers by Jackson Mohsenin on The Quora Blog. Written Aug 14, 2015.

Every day, people on Quora share their knowledge and expertise across a wide range of topics — everything from broad popular topics like Movies and Food to smaller, more specific topics like Typography and Superheroes.

Or Chicken Wing Eating Contests.

But, regardless of the size of the topic, we want to recognize the writers who are most actively contributing and helping people within the topics they know and care about. So today, we’re introducing Most Viewed Writers on topics.

…

We think Most Viewed Writers is a great way to highlight the writers who are most actively contributing to the topics they know about. It will also provide readers with a new way to discover outstanding writers and browse popular answers in their favorite topics.

So… how will “writers who are most actively contributing and helping people within the topics they know and care about” be recognised now?

Well I guess the badges are still there. For now.

Change to Most Viewed Writer by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates. Written Feb 15, 2017.

We found that the Most Viewed Writer component was often dominated by a random set of topics, not necessarily those in which the writer had made the best contributions, or wanted to write in the future.

So the solution is Not To Highlight Any Of Them. And instead:

Over the last year, we’ve made improvements to the profile page to help writers signal to readers what they know about and what they want to write about.

…

We’ve updated the Knows About section, streamlined the Credentials & Highlights section to be more relevant for readers, and most recently introduced Credentials.

Ah yes. My PhD is bigger than your PhD.

(It probably was, actually. 700 pp.)

These changes and more to come should allow a writer to have more control over how they’d like to be seen on Quora,

…

…

Uhuh.

and will improve the relevancy of questions they’re asked, and how readers perceive their answers.

Because there will be no MVW on a profile or a topic page. So people will only have credentials to go on—credentials which don’t appear and won’t fit on the A2A modal window, which are meaningless in many a topic, and which leave Quora the province of the formally recognised expert: the tenured academic and the startup developer. (Which no doubt is the Quora that the Founders intend it to be.)

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Those that have been following me closely will know that I felt compelled to take a few days off Quora recently.

What did I think, when I found out that anonymous answerers will not be able to comment or be notified on comments—followed immediately by this?

I thought of the Greek saying Θέλω ν’ αγιάσω μα δε μ’ αφήνουν.

“I’m trying to become a saint. But they won’t let me!”

Pornographia litterae sunt uno manu legendae.